I used to be so into fantasy football that I had to give it up about six years ago. I’d spend all this time researching pass defenses, injuries, match-ups, etc. that it took away from my enjoyment of watching games.
Last year, I wanted to shoot a comedy sketch that covered all 17 weeks of the season. We wrote a 12-page script then attempted to shoot it in one day. Some of the fantasy football sketches were 1/8 of a page, some were longer – 4/8 of a page to a full page.
While we were shooting a TV pilot together, Mike E. Winfield and I shot the fantasy football sketches in between the main shoot dates of the pilot. Last week, we released “The Fantasy Football Draft” which officially kicks off our fantasy football series.
Because it’s geared for a specific audience, we thought the sketches might only appeal to people who are in fantasy football leagues. But we wanted to try to appeal to a larger audience, so the writers and I created a rivalry between the lead, Mike, and the young boy, Lance. The rivalry plays out over the entire season and there are some pretty funny stuff; quick scenes where some jokes don’t pay off until future weeks. We’ll see how it plays.
I’ll probably stick most of the fantasy football sketches on our back-up channel – ZekeM2 – on YouTube, so our main channel doesn’t become the fantasy football channel. Our main channel is ZekeMahogany and we do a wide variety of comedy (and soon-to-be VFX sketches). The idea for the draft episode was to introduce this group of guys and how intense they are about fantasy football. And there’s always the one guy who doesn’t really know what he’s doing, shows up with a magazine, picks whoever the mag says to pick, and wins the league.
My friends and I gather for our fantasy drafts every year and it’s the only time I get to see some of the guys. In fact, my fantasy baseball league draft has been going on since the late 80’s and two guys from Pennsylvania fly out to California to do the draft in person. We also have a major league player in our league (who will remain anonymous). He actually drafted himself in the league, which was met with about five minutes of laughter and a lot of smack-talk.
The lead of the Fantasy Football sketches, Mike E. Winfield, recently shot two episodes of The Office as a recurring character and his first episode will air on Oct. 6th, so check him out as Mike E. breaks into the big time.
And come on over to our YouTube Channel and subscribe to see the rest of the fantasy football series as well as our VFX and comedy sketches. We’re just getting started over there, so please join us as we’re going to have a lot of fun as we just added a really great VFX artist to our team. Thanks for the support and thanks to ThisBlogRules for always being so kind to us.
Best wishes,
Zeke Mahogany Comedy